KINDNESS

Dolphins saves stuck whales
In New Zealand or any other areas for that matter, dolphins usually swim next to humans or play with each other. This time, they decided to do something different, a story that will make us smile and think about these adorable creatures.
People sawMoko, a bottlenose dolphin swim to two stranded whales and guiding them back to safety.



////////////////////Middle class parents worry needlessly about cot death, says authorBy JONATHAN GORNALL - More by this author » Last updated at 09:44am on 12th February 2008
Comments (1) Every new parent knows how it feels. The nagging fear at the back of the mind, the nights of broken sleep punctuated by the constant, anxious checking to make sure the baby is still breathing.
It's a measure of the fear induced by the spectre of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) that a multi-million-pound worldwide industry thrives on the back of it, peddling breathing alarms to worried parents on the basis that apnoea - when a baby stops breathing momentarily - is one of the causes of SIDS, even though there is no evidence that it is, or that such monitors have prevented a single cot death.



///////////////////AF=Negative Utilitarianism
24 March 2008, 01:15:56 Michael Anissimov
The basic idea of utilitarianism is to do the greatest good for the greatest number. A related idea, negative utilitarianism, requires us to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. According to its proponents, the greatest harms are more consequential than the greatest goods.
Would you rather avoid being tortured for a day, or engage in your favorite activity for a day? For many, the answer is obvious: avoid torture. This synchs well with humanity’s empirically demonstrated aversion to risk. It also makes sense evolutionarily, as avoiding pain was probably more adaptive than merely seeking pleasure.
Negative utilitarianism seems like a reasonable enough philosophy, at least at first. What could possibly be wrong with minimizing harm? Well, it turns out that the optimal implementation of negative utilitarianism would be to kill off all of humanity in the quickest and most painless way possible. That way, the probability of Earth-originating sentients experiencing harm in the future is reduced to zero. From the perspective of negative utilitarianism, this is the best possible outcome.
Hah! Now I’ll bet you think negative utilitarianism sounds like a horrible idea, don’t you? The problem is that it may be a philosophically appealing viewpoint to a subset of humanity. One challenge of futuristic technologies is that they may make possible the existence of groups that are unaccountable in practice. I’m not saying I want such groups to exist, or that such groups existing is a good idea, just that it could actually happen and we might be hard pressed to do anything about it. A prototype of such a scenario is given in the novel Aristoi, where aristocrats uses nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces to ensure absolute dominance over the rest of humanity.
If an Aristoi class decides that negative utilitarianism makes sense, then from their perspective, it could be quite appealing to destroy all of humanity. Do we have any intelligent strategies for averting such a possibility?



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Top 10 Excuses for Dying13 March 2008, 19:56:36 Michael Anissimov
1. Every year, there are fewer bars playing hits from the 70s.2. Afraid of getting into future accident involving flying cars.3. Wouldn’t want to disappoint my enemies.4. Cancellation of Family Guy.5. Escaping sexless marriage.6. Wanted to have an ironic gravestone.7. Trying to be more existentialist.8. Halo server is down.9. God made me do it.10. I have no friends.



//////////////////GAME THEORY AND RECIPROCITY


/////////////////HUMAN=JUST AN ADVANCED ANIMAL



//////////////////The first thing to understand is that copycat suicides are not something new. In fact there is an academic name for them - the Werther Effect - and this name shows that these strange deaths have happened for many years.
Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was published in 1774. And its publication was followed by many reports of young men shooting themselves. Why? It was widely believed that these suicides were copies of the death of the novel's hero.
When academic David Phillips studied copycat suicides in the early 1970s, he coined the term Werther Effect.
Studying suicides in the US between 1947 and 1968, Phillips found that within two months of a front-page suicide, an average of 58 more people than usual killed themselves. And there is also a sharp rise in car crash fatalities and other forms of disguised suicides.
In 2001 it was noted in the American Journal of Epidemiology that:
statistical evidence indicates that suicide clusters occur primarily among teenagers and young adults and that they account for 1–5 percent of all teenage suicides.
Now, if suicide is contagious (an idea also raised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point) it needs a means of spreading. And traditionally newspapers were that means.

SUICD MEME


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